How to Give Time Back to Your Team

Have you ever wondered whether you’re really making the best use of your time? Do you ever feel that too much of your day is spent on low-value activities that perhaps need to get done, but certainly don’t require your level of experience or training? At Pfizer, thousands of managers and professionals not only ask these questions every day but take action to off-load the lower-value tasks, so that they can focus on the work that will make the greatest difference. How they do this may provide a lesson for any organization that wants to better leverage its most valuable people.

Let’s start by understanding the problem: Every organization has noncore tasks that need to get done, but without enough steady volume in any one location to warrant a full-time staff to do them. They therefore end up getting distributed among many people. Traditional administrative support work such as scheduling meetings, sending sales letters, and preparing meeting notes falls into this category; semi-professional tasks such as developing presentation slides, analyzing and reporting survey data, and doing literature reviews also might be included. The challenge with these “necessary evils” is that they cause managers and professionals to use their time in fragmented ways with many interruptions, which complicates their day-to-day work. And on an organizational level, the fragmentation means that most of these tasks are not done efficiently.

Over the last decade, as costs have been cut and technology has driven managers and professionals to do much of their own administrative work, this problem has been amplified. In fact, in most organizations where personal secretaries or assistants are a thing of the past, managers and professionals end up juggling dozens of tasks — many of which could be done (or used to be done) by others.

Pfizer’s solution is to use communications technology and global resources to aggregate low-volume administrative and semi-professional tasks. Jordan Cohen, who pioneered this approach, calls it “pfizerWorks.” His notion is to take things that a lot of people do a little bit of and use technology to enable a few people (who happen to be part of an outsourced company) to do them on a full-time basis.

Cohen, who has made pfizerWorks an internal “business,” offers five services to more than 10,000 Pfizer managers (and the number is growing): secondary research, document creation (slides, flip chart typing, digital images), spreadsheet “jockey work” (entering, parsing, and setting up data), meeting support (scheduling appointments, reserving rooms), and project support (repeatable tasks). For each of these services, Cohen and his team make sure that the work is sufficiently structured and repeatable to hand off to a person in a low-cost location. All a Pfizer manager needs to do is click on the pfizerWorks desktop icon to send work directly to a support team in India or elsewhere, or talk with one of the outsourced team members if the work requires explanation. For example, a Pfizer new-business director outsourced a research project on the blood-substitute market that would have taken her months to complete. The real estate division used pfizerWorks support to update and maintain its detailed records of office usage around the world, requiring hundreds of phone calls and data entry tasks. Even the office of the Chairman and CEO uses pfizerWorks for streamlining its work.

Cohen originally called his business the “Office of the Future.” However, with thousands of people using the service, pfizerWorks has become the present — and continues to grow and evolve, saving Pfizer considerable money and giving time back to professional and managerial colleagues. If you’d like to learn more, you can read a case study about pfizerWorks on Gary Hamel’s open innovation project, Getting Rid of the Busy Work So You Can Get to Work.

At the least, it’s certainly worth considering whether this approach could work for your organization.

Partner Center

The email and password entered aren’t matching to our records. Please try again, or reset your password. If you have a username from our previous site, start by using that. Please See our FAQ for more.

If you are signing in for the first time on the new HBR.org but have an existing account, please enter your existing user name and password to migrate your account.Please see Frequently Asked Questions for more information.